When it comes to personal projects, I often fall into a cycle of stagnation as I begin to face obstacles of any sort whether it be inconvenient timing, unavailable resources, or simply indecisive creative direction. The cycle kind of goes like this: put a couple of hours of work in, put things away, return to the project, put a little more time in, reassess the project, put things away, scrap it all and start all over.

I knew if I wanted to actually ever be able to take the jump into the IndieWeb it would have to be with a completely different approach.

Enter the world of unapologetic lack of grace. Actually, this is only half true, simply writing this post attempting to justify the incredibly-imperfect-but-actually-somewhat-progressing state of my work indicates this approach is still a bit embarrassing and uncomfortable for me.

There's a slight bit of overhead in getting started on the IndieWeb and at first I really wanted to work out the nitty gritty of my approach before I took the jump. I found this to be another stagnation-inducing obstacle so I decided to dive right in and work out the details later instead. This meant I would take a familiar path and the easiest entry point no matter how much I really wanted to debate the best technologies, build and design my own theme, etc.

So, yes, I'm using Wordpress with the mostly-out-of-box-SemPress theme and things are clunky as I've installed a couple of plugins I haven't customized. Yes, the code could be prettier, and the footer is broken, my syndicated content looks a little funny, and there is no cohesion between the landing page and the blog. But I am here. I am generating content. This project is progressing.

Update: I'm now using Known and I've created a couple of custom content type plugins. Right now, my front page is static but I'm hoping to eventually make it dynamically generated. I need to do a lot of tidying up but I'm getting places!